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Rothesay Life, the pensions buyout group owned by Goldman Sachs, has insured a third segment of the TI Group Pension fund, which first began signing these pensions-insurance deals when the market took off in 2008.

Rothesay said this morning that it had signed a deal to insure £150m worth of the engineering group's fund, in addition to the £250m it already has on its books and another £250m that is looked after by rival insurer Legal & General.

Under the deal, Rothesay Life takes on the assets and agrees to manage the risks associated with the pension fund.

Both the previous £250m tranches were insured in 2008, just a year after the market for this kind of pensions deal first took off. That year companies passed £8.2bn of closed pension-fund assets to insurance companies, in return for guarantees that payments to retirees will be met.

Things have been tougher in this market since the financial crash, however, with fewer deals signed because they usually depend upon pension funds being in surplus, or else being heftily topped up by companies before sale.

In 2009, buyout firms signed £3.7bn of deals; in 2010 this jumped to £5.4bn as markets recovered, but 2011 has seen deals put on ice again as the eurozone slid into crisis and the financial markets have become more volatile.

About £2bn of deals have been done this year, with just under a month to go.

This week has also seen the advent of a new competitor to the pensions insurers, who include Rothesay Life, L&G, Aviva and Pension Corporation.

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Launched by David Norgrove, former chairman of the Pensions Regulator, the new venture – known as Long Acre Life – will aim to undercut its rivals by about 14% in price. It said it can do this by offering companies the option of taking an equity stake in the firm itself.

If a company wants to divest its legacy pension fund, Long Acre said, it can either pay about 140% of its total pensions bill to a conventional insurer, or 120% to Long Acre – in exchange for also purchasing an equity stake in Long Acre and participating in its expected profits.

However, this means that unlike a conventional buyout deal, any firm that takes up Long Acre's offer will not be able to fully sever ties with their legacy pension scheme.

The TI Group scheme's third buyout means it has guaranteed £650m of its liabilities; but with over £1.5bn of assets the scheme has plenty further to go. Partial buyouts of this kind have increased in popularity as the full buyout deals have become unaffordable thanks to market conditions.

TI is relatively unusual for having 'spread' several partial deals out among multiple insurance firms. Its latest transaction with Rothesay is understood to have been agreed at the end of 2010 following a competitive open-market tender - but it has taken until now to come to fruition.

Rothesay said it had been able to arrange a "target price mechanism" with the pension fund. This meant the insurer carefully monitoring the markets and pressing 'go' on the deal as soon as its price requirement and TI's asset portfolio matched.

Addy Loudiadis, the chief executive of Rothesay Life, said this had allowed the deal to be done "within hours of the target being hit".

Mike Abrams, secretary to the trustees of the TI Group Pension Scheme, said in yesterday morning's statement: “Working with Rothesay Life, we designed a process that allowed us to secure the policy when the value of our available assets was equal to the premium payable with no impact on the scheme’s funding requirements.”